Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/341

Rh but the existence and potency of which constitute the most certain of all our knowledge.

Not Nirvana, therefore, but effort; not death, but life, the development of moral power, and an ever-deepening moral consciousness through conflict with evil, is the lesson of evolutionary-ethics. Nor are we left to despair at the duration and impotency of the struggle. Its final subjective outcome is foreseen to be—like that of all other conscious endeavor, become habitual—a natural spontaneity of right action wherein men shall serve the right neither for ho]3e of reward nor fear of penalty, but from a divine inner necessity, which at once compels the volition and brings the unsought compensation of the highest intellectual satisfactions.

But, says Prof. Huxley, admitting that the moral consciousness is the result of evolution, "immoral as well as moral sentiments have been evolved by evolution. . . . There is, so far, as much natural sanction for one as for the other. . . . Cosmic evolution is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before." Let it be granted that the facts of human experience are more powerful than any theories as guides to individual action. If it were not so, the progress of the race would indeed be slow. But what is this but a recognition of the fact that morality is the result of an actual process of evolution which is independent of all mere doctrinal speculation? No rational theory of ethics, however, can fail to recognize that a true philosophy of life, a correct understanding of its facts, must furnish a tremendous incentive to right action. Just here, indeed, has been one of the chief stumbling-blocks in the path of moral progress. The race has been weighed down with disheartening theories of total depravity, moral lapse, and the inefficacy of natural effort for the improvement of character, at variance with all the known facts of human history. But evolution demonstrates that immoral and even criminal actions as we now regard them are usually survivals of customs or habits at some past time justified by the conditions of the physical and social environment. This furnishes at once hope for further progress by demonstrating the progress which has actually taken place and evolved a sense of evil in the commission of unsocial acts, and a hint as to the right method of promoting advancement in morally defective individuals. The recognition of the defect as a survival of past customary conditions is itself conclusive testimony to moral progress. The ultimate objective test of the moral character of an action is its influence in promoting fullness of life in the individual and in the race. To say that there is as much natural sanction for an immoral as for a moral action because both exist in the present stage of social evolution, is